# 12

# tips.

A few years ago, I was asked to facilitate a 20-minute presentation on How to Motivate and Inspire Students for staff professional development. Honestly, if I could master this topic to a group of overburdened and underappreciated elementary school teachers in 20 minutes then I am an educational prophet.

I created at least a 60-minute presentation that I attempted to fit into 20 minutes.

I titled my presentation Inspired to Inspire, and shared relevant tools and strategies that supported awareness and growth of what I consider to be the top three skills to grow wellbeing: self-awareness, sensory processing/integration, and emotional regulation.

*moving forward, let’s define wellbeing as a general state of balance (a sense of equilibrium - not too much, not too little, enough)

How does one inspire anyone else if one is not inspired? One cannot access an inspired state if one is not regulated.

As I spent a ridiculous amount of time preparing for the presentation, I narrowed down three practice tips (skills) that help when presenting personal material to a general audience who may or may not want to be receiving what you are sharing.

This hard-to-read slide (that I happen to have become quite fond of) includes a more recent interpretation of the three practice tips that support audience engagement.

How are these tools relevant as you practice self-care?

1. Recognizing Resistance. If you only learned how to use the skill of self-awareness* to become aware of resistance, you have placed yourself in the driver’s seat for positive change as it relates to day-to-day satisfaction of your ordinary experience. Resistance is what keeps us from moving toward discomfort. Resistance can feel like a tight tummy, an urge to argue, a repeated monologue, a headache, quitting, etc. Resistance is a wall that separates you from possibility. In a simple way, resistance is the stress response. The stress response (fight, flight, freeze, faint) is a highly intelligent system of protection. When the stress response is triggered we can consider ourselves to be in a closed state because we become rote. We survive. Our brain stem and limbic system are on auto pilot and the ability to thoughtfully choose to move toward a potential danger, threat, or challenge (perception of the problem) and be a problem solver is shut down. In school language, we cut ourselves off from our executive skills. We can learn all we want about executive skills - but they can’t be accessed if we are not regulated (in a balanced state).
2. On Board Thinking. I love that I came up with this term. Actually, I don’t know if I originated it or not - probably not and it really doesn’t matter. It is such a great term for those of us who visualize. It is also a fabulous ‘piggy-back’ to Recognizing Resistance. When you catch resistance, the resistance can be slowed by validating your response (okay I am not on board with _______) and ask yourself, ‘what CAN I get on-board with?’ If I’m at yoga practice and the instructor says something that I don’t agree with - do I get up and leave or have a miserable yoga practice - NO. I catch the resistance and tell my own story that soothes my nervous system and supports my alignment with possibility.
3. Choose Curious. These three shared skills, or ‘tips’, are meant to be very accessible and practical. Each of these skills can include so much more depth for understanding. To keep this simple, when I Choose Curious I am asking questions in a thoughtful way. If I am asking a question, I have set myself up to receive an answer. As we develop skills, we can learn to allow. Curiosity is the gateway to accessing higher order thinking - the open state where a broader view lives (executive skills in school speak).

*I use the terms mindfulness and self-awareness interchangeably.